How many people have shader based video cards?

#1 I guess I should respond to this blog, since I have a few video cards.

Desktop
nVidia 6800 GT (Shader 3.0 / 256 Meg)

Thinkpad
ATI Radeon x300 (Shader 2.0 / 64 Meg)

MacBook Pro
ATI Radeon x1600 (Shader 3.0 / 256 Meg)

#2 Maybe you should check this page, where you will find the results of the Valve's Steam hardware survey.
It should give you a pretty good idea of the average PC for a gamer.

Hope this helps.

Bye,
Jacopo

#3 That is a pretty interesting page. So only 10.90% of Half Life 2 players have video cards that do not support shaders.

#4 Probably not the best guage Jacopo as the people doing that survey are nearly all people with HL2 which requires a high end shader supporting machine already!

#5 Well the DirectX 7 path does not require shaders. I guess you could say that Half Life 2 is more of a game for hard core gamers, but at the same time it is one of the most popular PC games.

#6 No, Half-Life 2 will run on a TNT2.

#7 In my 3 main dev boxes I have a 6600, 9200SE and a GMA950. I don't think the GMA950 really counts as shader capable, though ;-)

One problem with asking here is we're all game developers. It's not really representative of the general game playing populace.

T.

#8 x2 Nvidia 7800s GT (Shader Model 3.0/ 256 meg)

:)

#9 Laptop - Dell XPS Gen 2
nVidia GeForce Go 6800 Ultra (Shader 3.0 / 256 Meg)

Desktop 1 - homebuilt
nVidia GeForce 5200fx (buggy Shader 2.0 / 128 Meg)

Desktop 2 - Micron
nVidia TNT2 (32 Meg)

#10 @Ian.
Actually, everyone with Steam installed could partecipate in that survey.
I don't remember the date, but (if I remember correctly) one of the patches for Counter Strike (the old one, not the Source version) required the presence of the Steam Client so I think that the results should be quite accurate for the average gamer (and not only for the HL2 users).
However, it covers only PC users, and not Mac and linux users.

Bye,
Jacopo

#11 There are a lot casual gamers with GMA900/950 thanx to Dell, HP and others to sell cheap computers with onboard cards...
Tha means alot of them cannot run shaders with good fps, or not to run them at al... Count on that.

Steam is not a good place to base your opinion, because they are not aimed at the casual gamer... Go figure...

#12 Well I honestly don't see Linux or Mac being huge platforms for games. Linux has never been a platform for games, and all of the companies that tried to make games for Linux, have gone out of business. On the other hand with the Mac, there is a small market for games, mostly filled by one publisher (http://www.aspyr.com/). Of course pretty much all of the games on the Mac are ports. Mac also has the huge issue of breaking things every time they upgrade their operating system, so you end up having to do a lot of work, just to sell a few of your games.

I don't really see the situation getting much better in the future. OpenGL has been responding to graphics card innovations very slowly, which is going to set Linux and Mac OS back further and further in the game market every year. At the same time Microsoft is doing things like limiting OpenGL support on Windows (it will only support OpenGL 1.4, using emulation). So I don't even see OpenGL being a viable platform for programming games in a few years.

Well anyways that's my opinion.

#13 Well that's another question. How many people that play casual games, actually play anything but flash games. I know a few people that are the typical casual gamers, but they usually play flash based games exclusively. Are casual games as people typically think of them, an over saturated market? Does it make more sense to go after niche market, that doesn't really have any other offerings (like a cricket game)?

#14 whoops hardware survey already posted

#15 @Alexander
Yes, you are right, but if we are talking about games that could benefit from shaders, then we are probably talking about a different market than the casual game market.

@Ray
I could be wrong, but I think that the Mac market is much more receptive to "indie" games than the PC market. Didn't someone from GG said that more than half of the sales from the GG website come from Mac users?

#16 From what I remember that was posted many years ago. The Mac market was a bit different a few years ago, because Apple was in a lot of trouble software wise. When they migrated to Mac OS X they had no games, and no software in general. That was a great time to get games on the Mac, because you were the only game in town (pun intended of course). At this point you can get a wide selection of ported commercial games, which makes it less likely that your game will be selected, instead of lets say the Sims 2, WoW or Doom 3.

I am not necessarily correct, but that is my understanding of the situation.

#17 Ray, what do you mean by supporting shaders ? it's a bit vague, as Intel has vidchips that only support the pixel/fragment part of things in hw, and do T&L purely in software...
A GeForce 2 has shader support (first gpu to do so), but it's quite limited compared to present offerings, etc.
Do you mean hw support for both vertex and fragment/pixels ? A specific revision of the shader model standard ?
'Cause if you're going to code for multiple SMs, might as well add support for a generic fixed function pipeline...
That said, I would say the vast majority of personal computers sold in the last few years have some form of hw shader support, but that doesn't mean the users have decent drivers installed, etc.
Just a few quick thoughts :)

#18 Mines ATI Shade 1.2-3.0 I bought it about a year ago to see the TSE demo, dont remember the model number right now.

#19 @Nicolas: Programming for multiple shader models is much easier than supporting fixed function shaders. Even if you support cards all the way down to Shader 1.1, you will know that you are getting a certain set of functionality if you are using DirectX 9. Essentially you can just query the card for its shader version (1.1, 2.0, 3.0) and very easily tailor the effects for each shader model. If you use include files in your HLSL programs, there will be very little replicated code anyways.

If you are supporting the fixed function pipeline, most effects require weird tricks to replicate or emulate them on the fixed function hardware. Most of those tricks include going into the C++ code and creating them by hand, not going into some text files and modifying the shader code. Granted some shader based effects require modifying C++ code, but its usually to a lesser extent, and the code is typically a lot cleaner and more reusable.

#20 Ray: I think you underestimate the Mac as a target platform for indie games.

I dont have any hard and fast figures to back this up, but every single sales chart I've seen that has indie games on mac and win, they come out either even, or ahead slightly on the mac.

I dont think the mac market has changed all that much to be honest. There were always mac porting houses doing AAA ports to mac. But your mac gamer is probably a bit more "indie" friendly than typical PC enthusiasts and have taken to games outside the norm a bit more maybe.

Fundamentally I'm still supporting the MAC as a platform as its something I think as indies we need.

Having said that, horses for courses, depends on your game. Air Ace will get a Mac version at some point, because it needs the exposure we can get from doing it. But thats going to need some help from GG to get the Mac TSE up and running.